


Constellatory

by bluenebulae



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Character, F/F, F/M, King Robb, M/M, Polyamory, Robb/Sansa is entirely platonic no incest stuff I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 06:54:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19969852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluenebulae/pseuds/bluenebulae
Summary: It’s strange and messy and maybe nobody else will ever understand them but it works. It’s theirs, and theirs alone, and nobody can take that from them.Or: Robb and Theon storm King's Landing, rescue the princesses, and save the kingdom. Then comes the hard part.





	Constellatory

**Author's Note:**

> this is super different than what i usually write so pls be gentle! 💖 disclaimer: i am not polyamorous whatsoever so this might not be an accurate reflection of how polyamorous relationships function - but i AM very bisexual and AM very in love with all these crazy kids.
> 
> also the concept of inheritance is very dubiously handled because idfw canon.

It is a warm summer night, only a few after Sansa discovers she is to be wed to Tyrion Lannister, when she hears a soft knock on her door.

She had not slept properly since the news of her fate, and so she is still wide awake to slide the heavy chamber door open just a crack, ready to slam it on any loathsome presence she might find. Instead, she sees a sliver of Margaery Tyrell’s lovely face, flickering in candlelight and pale with fear.

“Sweet Sansa,” she murmurs, and a little flutter of hope at the one bright thing in all of King’s Landing stirs in Sansa’s breast.

“Margaery,” she says, opening the door further. She sees now just how scared Margaery is, and the hope falls still. “What is it?”

“Loras says there has been an attack. The forces storm the streets of Fleabottom now. My grandmother bade me hide, but I—I do not want to be alone.”

Sansa draws Margaery into her chamber and shuts the door behind them, then bars it.

In the silence, now, she can hear faint shouts drift up from the streets below. If she strains her ears, she can make out the bright clash of metal on metal, the unmistakable sounds of a battle, like a king’s tourney but multiplied a thousand-fold. Her tower is too high up to see anything but distant fire. She feels cornered, the same as she had the night that the Hound had scooped her up and hidden her away at the Battle of the Blackwater. Now, though, she has at least one thing to calm the blaze of fear.

“Did Loras say whose army it is?”

Her voice is far calmer than she feels. Margaery shakes her head, her eyes huge.

The Lannisters had bested Stannis Baratheon once, but who’s to say he had not gathered his forces and his strange priestess and decided to re-prove his strength? The kingdom has no shortage of kings—Stannis, Joffrey, her own brother, the ominous whispers of the king beyond the wall. Maybe the distant threat of the last Targaryen had come to stake her claim and put the city to the dragon’s flame.

Sansa sees that Margaery has already thought of all these possibilities, and of all the ways they could go wrong. The terror is plain in the twist of her lips. And Sansa sees, too, that amidst the haze of fear, Margaery had come to _her._ Sweet, strong, selfless Margaery—she _needs_ Sansa.

So Sansa wraps her arms around the shaking queen-to-be and holds her tight.

They are silent as the sounds of battle grow louder, as the smells of rust, blood, and burning flesh begin to filter through her window. They kneel on the stone in the center of Sansa’s chamber, tangled in each other, Margaery’s fingers carding through Sansa’s hair. Sansa closes her eyes and raises a silent prayer to the Old Gods, and then one to the New.

She hears a small sniff and opens her eyes gain. Margaery’s gaze is far away.

“I shall die without ever seeing the gardens of Dorne.”

Her hand has stopped moving in Sansa’s hair. Sansa twists in Margaery’s embrace to face the other girl, their faces pressed close from reluctance to release each other, even a bit.

“I heard so many stories about them,” she sighs. “A thousand different flowers, all mingling in one magical place. I dreamt of seeing it one day, when all this bloodshed is over.”

“I shall never see Highgarden,” Sansa answers, her heart pounding.

“You would have loved it so. I know you would have, Sansa.”

Margaery spins lovely words for her from the blood-soaked air, of glittering towers and vast peaceful lakes and the finest elderflower cordial Sansa’s lips would ever taste. Then she sighs again, the noise even more despondent than the last, and Sansa would give up all the elderflower cordial in the world to steal her sorrow.

“I shall never taste the spices of Essos,” Margaery finishes.

“I shall never see the great stags of the Stormlands.”

“I shall never hear the songs of Old Valyria.”

“I shall never have a love like the stories I dreamed of,” Sansa says quietly, and averts her eyes.

She feels slight pressure under her chin, soft skin and the scent of roses, and Margaery tilts Sansa’s head to lock their eyes once again. Her breath fans across Sansa’s mouth, sweet as the rest of her, and Sansa wonders, suddenly, impossibly, if her lips taste just as sweet. They sit a heartbeat apart at the end of the world.

There is a _crash_ , and Margaery screams, her hands clutching Sansa’s shoulders.

The door rocks once, twice, then splinters. The tip of a sword plunges through. A sudden clarity washes through Sansa that she may well die now, but she does not go alone. And then two heads of curls burst through the opening, one dark as night and one sandy and wild.

Sansa cannot breathe, cannot allow herself to hope. But her name spills from the lips of both boys, each sounding as disbelieving as she feels. She pulls Margaery to her feet and holds her at her side until Robb’s arms are around her.

“How?” she whispers into Robb’s armor. He smells of blood and sweat, but arms are strong, holding her as if he’ll never again let go.

Robb pulls back to hold her at arms’ length, his eyes trailing over her face, her neck, making sure that she’s safe. “We came for you and Arya,” he says. “I’ve come to bring you home.”

Sansa is suddenly aware of the two other sets of eyes on them, and she turns under Robb’s grip, glancing at Margaery. The other girl stands upright, her mouth slightly parted, flushed and dazed. Past Robb’s shoulder, Theon Greyjoy is covered in dark splashes, an empty quiver strung to one shoulder.

“Robb, Theon,” she says. “this is Margaery of house Tyrell, future queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”

She realizes, too late, that it’s likely no longer true, but Robb has already released his grip on Sansa and is slowly approaching Margaery, almost reverent. Margaery is watching him curiously. The fear has all but vanished from her face, and now her eyes are glittering, her lips set in a soft pout. They curve up as Robb sweeps a low bow in front of her.

“My lady,” he says, in a voice Sansa’s never heard him use before.

She averts her eyes. Now Sansa feels as if _she_ is the outsider on an unbearably heavy moment, one she never intended to see, and heat rises in her throat. Desperately, she throws her gaze about until it alights on Theon.

The Greyjoy prince is still breathing hard, his curls flattened to his skull with drying blood, more of it soaking into the crevices of the squid emblem he proudly wears on his breastplate. He looks lost, caught somewhere at Robb’s back, but he turns to Sansa when he feels the heat of her gaze.

They meet in the middle of the chamber. Sansa realizes that in the time that has passed, she has grown nearly as tall as Theon; in the same time, he has grown handsome, his boyish features hardening into a strong jaw and a determined brow. In the candlelight, clutching his sword and staring at Sansa, he looks just like one of the knights she had imagined in her girlhood, come to sweep her away to a faraway kingdom and a fairytale love.

“Sansa,” he says, and then stiffens when she puts her arms around him. His grip, like Robb’s, is strong, but it sends an entirely different kind of excitement cascading through her.

-

Robb and Margaery marry three months after Robb ascends the Iron Throne.

Sansa hasn’t even had the chance to return to Winterfell before she finds herself lacing Margaery into her wedding gown. They had found the beginnings of Margaery’s dress for her wedding to Joffrey in a seamstress’s chamber, hidden away in a trunk they found as they explored the quiet, bloodied halls of the Red Keep. During the first few times that they ventured out of their haven in the tower in the days following Robb’s siege of King’s Landing, the two of them had been hesitant, especially Sansa; but they had grown more adventurous as the days wore on. When Margaery came across the sheets of white silk shot through with silver thread, she had gathered it up, running her fingers across the gleaming fabric.

“Shame to let it go to waste,” she had said thoughtfully, “now that there’s no Joffrey to be wed to in it.”

“Where else could you possibly wear it?” Sansa had asked.

Margaery had cut her eyes at Sansa and given her that devious crooked smirk that Sansa had come to know signals one of Margaery’s finer ideas. “Dear Sansa, who’s to say there won’t be any more weddings in King’s Landing anytime soon?”

She had been right, of course. When Robb proposed marriage to Margaery mere weeks after he found her in Sansa’s bedchamber, Lady Olenna had already sewn up the Dornish silk into a beautiful gown that flattered all of Margaery’s curves, but was simple enough to let her own beauty shine.

Even if Margaery had known all along that this is how it would be, she still brimmed with excitement as she burst into Sansa’s new, larger bedchamber that late-summer morning, a rose threaded into her chestnut locks and the color high in her cheeks. “Sansa,” she had sighed, “we shall finally be sisters,” and Sansa’s heart had plummeted before it soared.

Of course she is happy for them. Of course, she thinks as she helps to pile Margaery’s hair in a heap of fine curls atop her head, that there is no one kinder or more just that she could wish for Margaery than her brother. And he, in turn, will need all of the political prowess Margaery has so thoroughly mastered. A well-suited match, to be sure, and one that Sansa has no doubt will serve Westeros well as they rebuild the country from the ruins of war.

And yet the melancholy lingers, unbidden and unwanted.

They take their vows not in the Sept of Baelor, but outside the Red Keep in the swath of garden that stretches from the stone to the sea, in the sight of the Old Gods and the New. Sansa sweats through her new gauzy gown, blue like the summer waves, Margaery’s favorite shade. On one side of her, Lady Olenna sits misty-eyed; on the other, Theon is ramrod straight and clean-shaven, for once in his life completely alert. The absence of her siblings weighs on Sansa. Jon is lost beyond the Wall; Bran and Rickon had disappeared from Winterfell in the chaos of the war, and Arya had not been seen since the riotous night so long ago. The absence of a Stark in Winterfell—or here with Robb on this momentous day—sets her stomach churning.

She feels pressure on her hand and she looks down, tearing her eyes from Robb and Margaery’s glittering figures. Theon is still watching them, but his hand lies atop hers, loosely curled around it. His throat bobs as he swallows thickly, his mouth screwed up in a way that does not signal happiness.

Sansa understands. It has all ended so perfectly—more perfectly than she ever could have wished for on the dark, long nights of her imprisonment in King’s Landing—and she and Theon should be overcome with joy. And yet, as she hears the words of Robb and Margaery’s vows intertwining to fill the air like a song, she feels, instead, as if she is standing still as the world moves on around her. A forgotten reminder of the war with no place in this new peace.

She turns her hand beneath Theon’s so that their palms are pressed together and weaves her fingers through his.

Later, as evening descends over King’s Landing in brilliant shades of gold and pink as if the Gods themselves are celebrating the new royal union, Theon seeks Sansa out in the gardens.

The corner she’s found half-behind a hedgerow is just what she needs to catch her breath after an afternoon of high lords and ladies swarming around her, all asking about her brother and her closest friend and how delighted she must be for them. Sansa answered it all dutifully, of course, but there is only so much she can take. The foliage allows her glimpses of the new happy couple, practically radiant, but hides her from everyone’s view—or so she’d thought.

Theon doesn’t speak until he’s seated beside her. “They look happy.”

“They look perfect,” Sansa responds. “They _are_ perfect.”

She feels Theon shift, hears the rustle of fabric, and turns to see him scratching his neck, pulling at his collar distastefully. “Never did like these silly court clothes,” he mutters, and then meets her gaze and stills. “They suit you, though.”

His voice is low, heated. The gauzy fabric is suddenly too hot on Sansa’s legs. She offers him a demure smile.

“Thank you, Theon.”

They hadn’t been close in their youth. Sansa had mostly thought of Theon as an annoyance, too impermanent in the grand scheme she imagined to be her life to be worth her energy. In the past months, though, as Margaery and Robb had busied themselves preparing to lead a kingdom, Sansa had spent more time with Theon than ever before—taking meals and answering liege lords on Robb’s behalf and roaming the halls of the desolate keep with him in a vain attempt to make it feel like home. And Sansa had begun to notice things about Theon: the way he smiles at Robb when Robb isn’t looking, the copper tinge to his hair. How handsome and serious he’s grown since leaving Winterfell.

“Dance with me,” she says.

It’s a request, not an order, but Theon rises instantly and offers her his arm. The gown leaves Sansa’s arms bare; Theon’s sleeves are rolled up to the elbows. Their skin presses flush and seem to catch alight.

Theon leads her to the center of the garden, where the fountain is ringed with candles and surrounded with spinning bodies, before he takes her into his arms. The song is sultry, swaying; he holds her a breath tighter than he needs to, and Sansa does not pull back. She takes note of the hard knot of muscle at the nape of his neck, the faint scent of salt that graces his skin, the way his rough stubble brushes her arm when he twirls her. He is no longer the sullen boy of his youth, but a _man,_ steeped in seawater and hardened by war, only soft in moments like this when the light catches on the blue of his eyes and turns them luminous green.

“Sansa,” he murmurs, dipping so that his lips brush her ear. “I wanted to ask you…”

A flash of white over his shoulder, and Sansa’s heart stutters. Her hand slackens on Theon’s as the song ends.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Margaery says. She still glows softly with a flush of joy, for once unable—or maybe simply uninterested—in hiding her true emotions from the world.

“You didn’t.” Sansa pulls away from Theon entirely, her skin chilling in the places where his no longer warms it. “Theon and I were just—”

But he’s gone, vanished into the crush of dancers. Margaery giggles, bell-like, and twines her fingers with Sansa’s.

“Well, if you’re in need of a new partner, may I step in?”

Sansa trades hard for soft, salt for sweetness. She doesn’t care that the guests around them must all be staring at the strange sight of two ladies dancing together. Margaery is small, much shorter than Sansa, and yet she seems to fill all of the air around Sansa regardless.

“Congratulations,” Sansa murmurs, realizing she hasn’t yet said the word to Margaery.

The queen sighs and rests her forehead against Sansa’s shoulder, just as she did a world ago in Sansa’s bedchamber. “This is the start of a new life for all of us. We’re safe now, Sansa. Robb, the lords of the North, Theon…”

She gives Sansa a pointed look that Sansa nearly misses, entirely caught up in the way the fine hairs at Margaery’s neck curl around the shell of her ear.

Feeling herself flush— _from the heat of the southern weather, from the crowd_ , Sansa tells herself, even though evening’s chill has already set in and raised gooseflesh along her arms—she rips her gaze from Margaery’s distractingly perfect neck and looks past her shoulder. Theon and Robb are standing just beyond the edge of the dancers, their heads bent together, watching Sansa and Margaery. Robb looks blissful; Theon is inscrutable, until she catches his gaze and he gives her a sad sort of smile, one that she’s still trying to figure out when Margaery whirls her back into the crowd.

-

It is a late night, one of many they’d spent in the war room trying to untangle the thorny knot of grudges and hostilities that is Westeros, when Sansa catches Robb alone in the hallway. She had seen shockingly little of her brother since his marriage to Margaery, at least outside of formal settings; he always seemed to be rushing off to one meeting or another, and Sansa longed for the days immediately after the North stormed King’s Landing, when she and Robb and Theon and Margaery would huddle like transients around the hulking kitchens and drink Cersei’s fine wine and forget about the blood soaking the streets and the fact that all of them still felt like ghosts in the castle that was now theirs. Robb has grown into his position, now, no doubt with Margaery’s help, but the only thing Sansa has grown is lonely.

Worse yet is the way she knows her loneliness will be exaggerated when she returns to Winterfell in only a few short days. Theon will return with her, but as much as she values his company, as comfortable as she is by his side now, she knows it’s at Robb’s insistence and nothing more. She knows by the way he will dash from a room at the word that Robb needs him, at the way he’d done it the night before, when he’d knocked on Sansa’s door with an offering of lemon cakes and wildflowers only to leave her calling down the hall after him minutes later.

It weighs heavier on her than it should, especially now. The image of Theon paling and wordlessly rushing from her chamber won’t leave her head. It’s still there when she brushes shoulders with Robb in the dimly-lit hall, and as petty as she knows it is, it’s the reason her immediate reaction is to annoyance instead of the usual warm comfort that washes over her upon seeing her brother.

“Watch where you’re going,” she snaps without thinking. Robb looks up, but he’s still only half-focused on Sansa, the other part of his mind in another part of the realm.

“Oh, Sansa. I’m sorry.”

He reaches out, to grab her shoulder or hug her, maybe, but Sansa twists away. Robb’s face falls. “Are you alright?”

 _No._ “Of course.”

Her brother searches her face, and Sansa stills, refusing to look at him.

“What’s going on? You’ve seemed out of sorts—”

“How would you know?” she bursts out. “I never see you anymore. You _or_ Margaery. I’m going to be gone soon, you remember that, right?”

“Of course I do,” he says. His voice is placating, the same one he used on Arya when she threw temper tantrums in her childhood, and Sansa _hates_ her brother, she does.

“But it’s alright for you, because you have Margaery, right? You have Margaery and your council and your Kingsguard, and you have Theon, don’t you see I have _no one_ —”

“Theon is going to Winterfell with you,” Robb counters, growing impatient.

“Because you _told_ him to! He does whatever you say, he doesn’t actually care about me, you just ordered him—”

“Are you blind?” Robb shouts. He laughs, a bitter, hard sound. “You think Theon is leaving—is going to Winterfell for _me_? He asked me to go with you, Sansa! How can you not see—”

He breaks off, the fight suddenly draining from his shoulders, leaving him ten years older and yet closer to the brother of Sansa’s youth than the king he is now. Sansa’s mind races to keep up with his words.

“I’m sorry,” Robb mutters, and slinks off down the hall.

By the time she leaves for the North at the break of dawn a matter of days later, she still doesn’t understand. She holds Margaery tight, breathes in her rosy scent and her soft warmth.

And then, as Theon helps her into her saddle, his hands careful around her waist as if she’s fragile—precious to him—she begins to understand what Robb had meant.

-

The castle is unbearably empty when they first return.

It had stood silent for too long while the dust had settled in the South, the Starks absent from its halls for months on end, held together by only a skeleton crew of maids and servants after Bran and Rickon disappeared with Hodor and the wildling woman in the dead of night.

One person waits to greet them at the gates: Sansa’s lady mother, a gaunt ghost of her former self, but her arms around Sansa still feel like home.

Theon will not leave her side for the first month. He joins her when she breaks her fast, remains with her as she sits on her father’s wolf-head chair in the drafty hall, feeling like an impostor the entire time. He lays a comforting hand on her shoulder while she pores over each and every raven that flits into the rookery, her eyes trained sharp for any of her siblings’ names on the reams of parchment. At night, sometimes, before she retires to her bedchamber, he stops to hold her tight and it keeps the Lannister-shaped demons out of her dreams.

Bit by bit, he begins to take over the everyday duties of running a castle and a kingdom, leaving Sansa free to spend her time scouring the world for the pieces of her family. Lady Catelyn helps, she does, but she has seen too much and lost too much as well, until Sansa sends her to King’s Landing with Ser Rodrik to see if Robb and Margaery can return a bit of the happiness to her that Sansa could not. Her heart aches as she watches their horses recede into mist, but she knows how trapped her mother must feel here. Sansa feels it, as well.

And all the while, Winterfell endures, silent and ancient. Sansa wakes at night too often to the groans and wails of wind outside her rattling window, the bleak reminder than even if the kingdoms are finally at peace, winter is still coming and there is nothing they can do to stop it. The howling increases after Lady Catelyn leaves, growing and groaning until Sansa, one night, cannot take it anymore.

Theon answers her knock too quickly for the late hour. He looks bleary, but not startled, and Sansa knows he must not have been able to find rest, either. His curls are in disarray; his shirt is open to the waist.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Sansa says. “I just…couldn’t sleep.”

Wordlessly, Theon opens the door wider and invites her in.

In their youth, he and Jon had slept away from the rest of the Starks, hidden in smaller chambers near the kitchens like shameful secrets. Sansa wouldn’t allow it when they returned, and she’s glad for it; he’s closer to her now, and his bed is large and piled with furs. She means only to sit with him for a few moments and maybe listen to him talk, to drown out the howl of the wind, but once she sinks down she finds herself loathe to get up and then she’s lying next to Theon, his arm draped loosely over her waist, counting his breaths.

She wonders what her mother would think, what Arya would think, or Robb. And she remembers Robb’s words— _he asked me to go with you, Sansa_ —and how the heat she feels through her nightdress is the same sparkling sensation she’d felt in his arms at Margaery and Robb’s wedding. The sound of his breathing dampens winter’s cries, and she sleeps.

Arya appears at the gates the next morning, bedraggled and blistering with energy and alive and whole.

From there, Sansa’s heart mends piece by piece. Arya and Theon spar in the courtyard, and Sansa can imagine Jon and Robb with them. Reports flow in from liege lords that despite the bitter weather, their crops bloom and Robb’s forces protect them well. Lady Catelyn returns with news from the South—Robb and Margaery remain busy, but by all accords, are handling their new positions gracefully and with bliss—and bearing a gift from Margaery: a delicate bracelet, a pattern of shining bronze roses inlaid with fragments of quartz, that brings thick tears to Sansa’s eyes. Her hands tremble too much to close it around her own wrist; she has to ask Theon to do it.

She still aches to return to them sometimes. Those transient, idyllic days in the direct wake of the North’s victory are the subject of too many of her daydreams, and she knows Theon longs for them, as well, from the way his eyes soften whenever she brings them up. Sansa cannot go south—she must remain in Winterfell, for the stability of her kingdom and to keep up the search for her siblings—but Theon could, and yet he doesn’t.

She asks him why, late on an especially cold night, as they huddle in the furs on his bed. It’s become a habit for her to visit him when she can’t sleep, and if her mother and Arya notice, they never mention it.

Theon stills when she asks, his gaze suddenly drifting away, until it settles on their hands resting side by side on the soft grey pelt. Slowly, deliberately, he inches his fingers across until they’re entwined with hers’.

“Because you need me here.”

Sansa kisses Theon Greyjoy that night. It is the first kiss in her life she has ever initiated. He tastes just as she imagined he would, like the sea and the sun, and when she pulls away he smiles at her gently like Joffrey never did, like how she’d always wanted a handsome knight to smile at her.

And then it is surprisingly easy. Theon is a rock in the storm around them. He holds her through her nightmares and her fears of inadequacy; when she becomes stressed, lashing out at everyone, he takes on more of her letters and meetings and duties without a word. Sansa can’t help but contrast him to his younger self, so brash and carefree, and she wonders what must have happened during the war to turn him into this Theon that she could love.

That, too, she wonders about. Sansa has never before been in love, so she has no way of telling if the glowing warmth that spreads through her chest when he holds her is the same emotion that has inspired all the stories and songs. To her, the thing it feels closest to is the sunny days she would spend with Margaery walking about the Red Keep’s gardens—that same safety in the chaos, that same shyness.

Sansa wonders what Margaery will think of them. What Robb will think.

She mentions it, offhand, in a letter to Margaery two months later when it becomes clear to Sansa that it’s much more serious than a dalliance. Her response is three gushing pages to the effect of _thank the Gods, it took you both long enough_ , with Robb’s comments interspersed through Margaery’s flowery hand. Sansa shares it with Theon by the fire that night and they laugh over it and it almost feels as if they’re all back together again.

-

One year after Robb becomes king, nothing and everything has changed.

Bran and Rickon return, ghosts in their eyes, protected by a skittish Meera Reed; they all take up residence in the castle’s west wing, and slowly the halls begin to fill again with laughter. The pack returns, bit by bit. Bran is not the same, and it pains Sansa to look at him sometimes. Nobody knows what horrors he’s seen. Arya grows restless, cooped up in the castle. Jon is a specter that flits through the world beyond the wall, always just out of their grasp.

And through it all, by her side, Theon is there. They venture south for a few blissful days, using the guise of trade negotiations to spend long nights in the Red Keep’s hall with Robb and Margaery. (Margaery has redecorated, pink and blue and silver where before there was only bloody red, and Sansa thoroughly approves.) She sees the way Theon orbits Robb, how the two still finish each other’s thoughts all these years later, but he returns to Winterfell with her and three days later, on a walk through the Godswood, drops to his knee and pledges his life to her.

After that, it’s a bit of a blur.

Robb offers them their pick of places in King’s Landing to marry, but Sansa wants to remain in Winterfell, which has finally once again begun to feel like a home. She watches Theon ride off to the Iron Islands to tell his family with only a hint of trepidation. She throws herself into the search to bring Jon home. She loses herself in a haze of white fur and candles and handwritten invitations, and she fields the congratulations that pour in from the other kingdoms, many of them thinly-disguised statements of curiosity or anger. She knows the question of her hand in marriage was a hotly-contested one, but she cannot bring herself to care what anyone else thinks of her and Theon. The world is theirs now, to do with as they wish. Robb sits on the throne; what do alliances matter to the sister of the king?

And then, after Sansa and Theon have reassembled the scattered pieces of their lives and brought them all together, Sansa looks around the great hall of Winterfell the night before her wedding and nearly bursts with pride. Arya and Bran and Rickon, Robb and Margaery, her mother and even Lady Olenna and Yara Greyjoy—their voices swell and fill the hall and create a song so beautiful it pierces straight into her heart. She could float away if it weren’t for Theon’s hand in hers tethering her to the earth.

They filter out slowly, the song growing quieter, until only Robb and Margaery linger with them at the high table. Neither wear their crowns tonight. Margaery looks different draped in winter furs—still beautiful, but fiercer somehow, almost primal.

“Funny how this all worked out,” Theon says with a sideways smile at Sansa. Her hand tightens around his.

Margaery throws her head back to laugh. Her caramel curls tumble down from their elaborate pile. “Just think what could have happened if you and Robb had slashed open the wrong door. You could be wed to Myrcella Baratheon by now.” She cuts her eyes at Theon.

“Don’t be foolish, Margaery. A Lannister, really, you have so little faith in me—”

Sansa takes a long sip of wine, feeling the warmth bloom in her chest as Margaery and Theon continue their friendly bickering. It _is_ funny. They sound like siblings in her haze of red wine, the way she used to wail at Robb and Arya for teasing her.

“Sansa?”

Robb’s voice is low, delving beneath their lovers’ protests, and Sansa looks up at him. His mouth smiles, but his eyes are unsure. She watches them fall to her hand in Theon’s atop the table.

“—or maybe _you_ would have married Sansa.”

She stills, her eyes still locked with Robb’s.

Margaery laughs again, but it’s too high-pitched, a brittle sound. “Tell me in what kingdom that could have ever happened, Theon? The world doesn’t work like that—”

“But would you have, if it did?”

Sansa suddenly feels the impact of all the wine she’d drunk in a great big rush to her head, making her woozy. She doesn’t know where to look—at Theon, his mouth suddenly grim; at Margaery, bright pink and fiery; at Robb, utterly bewildered. She doesn’t know what’s happened, but something has broken, something that had been on the verge of breaking for a very long time.

Margaery flips her hair over her shoulder, an attempt at haughtiness that doesn’t land. “It’s a moot point, isn’t it? You and Sansa are to be wed, and she shall never even know if she has a taste for girls. What a shame.”

“Do you?”

The silence stretches long across the room. Sansa wants to pluck the question from the air and cram it back down her throat. Now all three of them are looking at her, the men’s mouths slightly open.

Margaery reaches for the decanter and pours herself a long draft of red wine, takes a few sips, and then levels her gaze back at Sansa.

“They say it runs in families, you know.”

The tension is broken by Theon’s scoff. “That’s absurd. If that were true, _I’d_ be—”

His eyes cut to Robb and he’s silent. Sansa wishes she had drunk even more wine. Theon’s right, and the only reason they’re all acting so strange is because they’ve drunk too much and they’re growing up.

“This is ridiculous.” Margaery stands, the action so abrupt that she nearly knocks over her chair. Sansa watches it teeter on two legs, hanging in limbo, and she’s so distracted that she doesn’t realize what is happening until Margaery’s kissing her.

It’s Margaery, but _more_ , everywhere around Sansa, her floral scent clinging to her even in the cold dead North and filling Sansa’s mouth with the heady aroma, with sweetness and softness and _oh_. Sansa understands. _This_ is what she’d been longing for in every moment she’d wanted Margaery closer but hadn’t understood how that was even possible. It’s so different from kissing Theon, and yet so similar.

 _Theon_. Sansa’s eyes snap open, and the moment breaks. She stares at Margaery, confused, and then turns immediately to apologize, but Theon is not there. She peers around Margaery’s shoulder.

He has his arms looped over Robb’s chair, hands clasped across her brother’s chest, and Robb is watching her with the same hesitant realization she’s sure she herself wears on her face.

“ _Oh_ ,” Sansa says.

“Oh.”

Margaery repeats it as she circles to perch on the arm of Sansa’s chair, threading her fingers into Sansa’s locks. “We’ve all been fools to not admit it for this long. Might as well get it out there.”

“It’s not right,” Robb says, but he seems distracted by the way Theon’s fingers inch across his chest and up over his shoulders.

“Who is there to tell us no?” Margaery murmurs. “It’s our world now. We can still play their game; they don’t have to know.”

Some silent understanding passes between her and her husband as Sansa watches. Robb turns to Theon, clears his throat.

“Since we were boys,” he says hoarsely, “I—”

“You don’t have to explain.” Theon’s smile is soft, and yet a good deal cockier than the one he reserves for Sansa, hints of the old Theon that had annoyed her so sliding through. “Me and your wife, we just can’t get enough of you Starks, it seems.”

He returns Sansa’s gaze then, and the cockiness falls away entirely. “Is this alright?” he asks, and though all four of them are listening, Sansa knows the words are only for her.

Before she nods, she looks down at Margaery’s hand, still twisting through Sansa’s hair. And it all falls into place: she can love Margaery and not love Theon any less for it. She has enough of herself to give to these two people who had both saved her in such different ways, and they will continue to give her different things, and a piece of her that has felt empty since she left Margaery’s arms in the tower on that bloody night is once again whole.

“Yes,” she says.

-

They are wed the next day at noon in the Godswood. Bright winter sun filters red through the leaves, casting a warm glow over everyone; Sansa walks past the lake on Robb’s arm, clad in white furs, and cannot stop the smile from bursting forth on her lips. Her brother’s touch is tentative at first, but Sansa sinks into his arm and knows that the broken thing between them has been healed. They understand, now.

Margaery’s face beams up at her from the front of the crowd, and Sansa looks past her to Theon, his grin tender, his smile for her. Robb’s hands linger on Theon’s arm as he places Sansa’s hands in Theon’s, and for the briefest of moments, his face wears the same sad look she’s sure she wore at his wedding to Margaery, but it passes and he smiles gently at her and Sansa brims over with love.

The ceremony is brief. The Old Gods watch over them as Maester Luwin feeds them lines to repeat, but even so, Sansa’s face aches from smiling by the time she’s done. There is only one oddity to the ceremony: after they’ve pledged themselves to each other, the words “I take this man” sweet on her lips, Yara Greyjoy steps forward and trickles saltwater over their heads as they embrace. A piece of the sea, here with him, his claim ceded to Yara but not any less of a Greyjoy for it.

Theon had tried to explain the idea of salt wives and rock wives to her late at night, tangled up in front of the fire as the winds of winter roared outside. Sansa hadn’t quite understood.

“Which one am I to be, then?”

“You,” Theon had said, “are everything.”

He repeats the words now as freezing water climbs down Sansa’s neck, soaking the collar of her quilted dress, but she does not shiver. She sinks into Theon’s kiss.

Later, when they’ve all returned to the Great Hall of Winterfell to celebrate, Margaery pulls Sansa aside into a just-hidden-enough doorway and kisses her senseless. “The most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen,” she murmurs into Sansa’s neck, and Sansa wants to argue because that can’t be true, that was Margaery and she can’t even compare, but Sansa can’t seem to form the words to say so, her brain occupied with a fog of _Margaery Margaery Margaery._

When she returns to Theon, he too is blushing and grinning rakishly. He spins her into Robb’s arms; Robb spins her into Margaery’s; and it is all that Sansa could have asked for, and more.

-

It’s only natural, after Theon has settled into his new wolf-carved seat and Sansa has settled into her new domestic love, that the king and queen invite them to the Red Keep ( _such an awful name,_ Margaery writes in her invitation. _I think I shall change it again. The Sunset Tower, maybe, or the Rose Palace._ ) It would be remiss of the future lady of Winterfell to turn down such an invitation, Sansa writes back, and resolutely does not think of the way her heart shudders at the thought of days alone with Margaery in the garden by the sea.

Lady Catelyn and Sansa’s siblings see them off; Bran and Rickon had already spent nearly a full moon in the South when they’d returned, and even if her younger brothers don’t understand, Sansa’s mother must have realized _something_ of the truth in their journey. Sansa can hear it when she says _go_. She has no one to tell.

Seeing the Red Keep again brings up vile memories at first, but they are quickly overwritten with laughter and warmth, the doors flung wide, the halls spilling with light like Sansa had never seen them do before. They take their supper in Robb and Margaery’s royal chambers, the intimacy of it enough to remind Sansa of their first days together in the castle. Theon lounges in Robb’s arms. Margaery sparkles in the firelight.

Then she stands and takes Sansa’s hand, and Sansa is confused until Margaery winks at her husband and murmurs “good night, my lord,” in a sultry voice that shoots straight through Sansa to her core, and then the dark hallway is swallowing the kisses Margaery presses to Sansa’s neck.

“What—” Sansa begins, but is quieted by the press of Margaery’s lips to her own.

“I was worried,” Margaery murmurs when she pulls back, “that Lord Greyjoy would not like me sharing his bed with you tonight, but it seems he has other plans.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Sansa says, and feels a heated flush radiate out from her chest across all of her skin.

The chamber in which she and Theon were to lay faces the sea, salty air pouring in and fluttering the curtains. Sansa stands shyly at the doorway until Margaery tangles the fingers of both her hands into Sansa’s, her little lopsided smirk suddenly falling into something softer.

“If you don’t want…” she says softly.

But Sansa _does_ want. She wants with her whole being.

She chases Margaery onto the mattress. Her soft curves align with Sansa’s in different spots than the places Theon’s broad shoulders and sharp angles do; her kisses are more dominant, and yet sweeter as well. She moves more slowly, attends different parts of Sansa’s body. Sansa’s fingers thread through her long hair where she would usually clutch at shoulder blades and knots of muscle. The air fills with higher moans, and when Margaery looks up at Sansa with hooded eyes, Sansa finds clarity at the peak of pleasure: this is why she could never be jealous of Robb, why she can love her husband and Margaery with the same intensity and not feel split in two. Margaery gives her something Theon never could, and Theon does the same for her, and for Robb too, she is sure.

She shudders and falls apart in Margaery’s arms. Somewhere in the same castle, two men give themselves over to years of tension. The rest of the world may see it as confusing, disgusting, wrong—but they understand each other, and that is what matters.

-

Their visits south grow frequent. They hide behind the guise of providing counsel to their king; the threat of the Lannisters has been neutralized, the queen gone and the brothers locked away, but war looms over Westeros with every snowflake that drifts past the Wall. One such snowflake finally brings Jon Snow home with it, eyes wide and wild, bearing stories of icy soldiers swelling from the ground and striking fear throughout Winterfell.

So Sansa and Theon traverse south, ostensibly to discuss this new, mysterious threat, hoping that nobody looks too hard at the smiles on their faces or listens too much to the Red Keep at night. It works, for a time; they live in the in-between and Sansa ignores her mother’s soul-searching looks upon their return. But the court whispers, as it always does; Theon and Margaery can be less than discreet.

They retreat to Highgarden. It becomes their refuge. Nobody except Lady Olenna is there to see them, and she seems more inclined to delight than disgust when she catches a rare moment of stolen affection between any of them. The towering garden hedges conceal them from prying eyes, and to Sansa, it’s as close to paradise as she thinks she’ll ever get. Margaery teaches her the names of every flower, twines them through Sansa’s hair and presses them between the pages of her books; they gorge themselves on brightly-colored cordials made of blossoms and honey-thick sunlight. The long winter fades away for every few blissful days they can snatch from the rush of their lives. Everything fades away.

It is late at night on one such day of stolen heaven that Margaery turns to Sansa as they lay in bed, cool silk sheets the only thing between their skin. Margaery props her head up on one hand, lets her eyes trail down Sansa’s body, and even though she’s used to Margaery’s admiration by now Sansa fights back a blush.

“What if we didn’t have to leave?” Margaery murmurs.

Sansa’s eyes, half-lidded, open fully to look at the queen. “Don’t say such silly things,” she murmurs, trying her hardest to block the idea entirely from her mind before it takes root there and grows.

“It’s not so silly. We deserve happiness, Sansa, all of us, after what we’ve been through.”

“You’re the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. You and Robb have to remain in King’s Landing, and Theon and I belong in Winterfell.”

“Or,” Margaery says, hitching her head up higher so that her caramel locks spill onto Sansa’s chest, “you could come to King’s Landing with us. Theon could be Robb’s Hand.”

Sansa sucks in a breath. She tries to avoid Margaery’s eyes, but they’re huge, everywhere, luminous in the candlelight.

They’d planned this, Margaery and Robb. Sansa can see it in the hope on Margaery’s face. She can imagine Robb and Theon having the same conversation now, how hard it must be for Theon to turn it down. It is not Sansa’s decision to make. She will never again belong in King’s Landing, with vicious ghosts lurking around every corner. She knows her place—with her pack, in the North. But Theon is her lord, and she knows how common it is for lords—especially Hands of the King—to leave their lady-wives safe in their great stone fortresses far from the capital as they secure the future of the realm. Jon Arryn had done it to her aunt; her father had done it to her mother, no matter how much they loved each other, and Sansa’s stomach lurches as the thought of being alone again, _truly_ alone, as the frigid winter descends.

But no. Sansa knows Theon, Sansa trusts Theon. She knows what his answer will be. It would be selfish of Robb to ask, but the king and queen had never quite mastered selflessness when it comes to their Northern lovers.

“You know we can’t,” Sansa says as gently as possible, and feels a piece of her own heart splinter off inside her. “We have our duties to the kingdom. And people would talk, besides.”

“Let them talk.” Margaery’s eyes flash equal parts of anger and mischievousness.

“You know the cruel things they said about your brother and Renly. What will happen when it’s all of us? How much worse would it be? Margaery—”

“You want it, though,” Margaery says, a note of desperation that Sansa’s never heard before creeping into her voice. This is not the calm, methodical queen she knows. “We all want it.”

Yes, she wants. She wants more than anything.

“We couldn’t exist like this anywhere else,” Sansa whispers. She presses a kiss to the corner of Margaery’s mouth, accentuating her words. “We’re lucky to have this. Luckier than we should be, by far.”

She means Highgarden, but she means more than that, as well; the two hearts beating only doors down from them, the perfect little constellation they’d made. No jealousy, no pain; the world had given them more than enough of that. It’s strange and messy and maybe nobody else will ever understand them but it _works_. It’s theirs, and theirs alone, and nobody can take that from them.

-

The world moves on, inexorable.

Time waits for no one, not even the King and Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. The freefolk scale the wall, the warning tide in the waves of icy soldiers who will batter the North and plunge it into night for months on end, while Theon and Sansa protect their kingdom as best they can. Rumors of dragons swirl over King’s Landing like a fiery storm and never quite materialize. The last Lannisters prostrate themselves at Robb’s feet, the proud brothers finally humble, and Stannis Baratheon vanishes east into the mist. Arya sneaks away to head west with a boy from Fleabottom on some secret personal mission; Bran withdraws into himself.

Somewhere, in the mess of it all, Sansa grows heavy with child.

Margaery toes the line between excitement and jealousy when the king and queen arrive to herald the birth of Winterfell’s newest heir, but she showers little Alannys with love anyway. Besides, she isn’t alone for long; Eddard and Lyanna Stark come screaming into the world less than a year later, and even with the unrest, people all across Westeros find the will to celebrate.

And all the while, they hold onto each other.

It’s difficult more often than not. They go months without seeing each other. Theon and Sansa barricade themselves into Winterfell for a whole year against the White Walkers, and it is far too dangerous for the queen to venture into the thick of the supernatural war, much less the king. Sansa picks petty fights—with Bran, with her mother, with Theon most of all—but when the dawn finally rises, she is safe in his arms.

Salt-grey threads into Theon’s beard as Alannys grows tall. Margaery’s belly swells again, and Sansa rushes south to hold her as she cries bitter tears of loss only a few months later, but little Ned and Lyanna are strong and good and beautiful and have the hearts of every kingdom, just as their mother and father do.

For it never becomes quite common knowledge, what happens late at night in the royal halls of the Red Keep, the soft footsteps and giggles and the gentle whispering kisses. Rumors abound, of course, as they are wont to do by the nature of the court. But they remain that way—just rumors—and Sansa and Theon and Robb and Margaery remain as they are, too: their own strange, loving family.

Years later, the maesters will write of the triumphant beginning of the long Stark dynasty, of King Robb and Queen Margaery’s prosperous, just reign. And every single book, without fail, will always mention one thing: that there was never a house more loyal to the throne than the Stark-Greyjoys of the North.


End file.
